We highlight the hardware that gets you the most performance per dollar spent

We all know that, generally speaking, buying the newest top-end part gets you the most performance. But in most cases, the premium you pay for that part covers a whole lot of other stuff as well that has no bearing on frame rates or video encoding times. We’re talking about the added cost of covering research and development, product marketing, lower production yields, etc. That high price also includes a vanity tax, if you will—the extra charge incurred by folks who simply want to have the latest hardware, hot off the fab, for bragging rights.

Note: This article was taken from the December 2012 issue of the magazine.

CPUBoss aims to make it easy to search for and compare CPUs.

Do you know which is the overall better buy between an Intel Core i7 3770K and AMD FX 8350? If shopping mobile devices, do you know how Nvidia's Tegra 3 stacks up against Texas Instruments' OMAP 4 (4470)? We live and breathe technology and it's literally our job to know the answer to those types of questions, but if you have better things to do than sit around all day and study processor technologies, you might find CPUBoss.com a helpful site the next time you're in the market for a system, big or small.

Budget buyers can now cross Ivy Bridge for around $42.

Volume production of Intel's Ivy Bridge processors began way back in the third quarter of 2011, with dual-core and quad-core parts launching at the end of April, 2012. Nine months after launch, Intel has decided to stretch its 22nm Ivy Bridge architecture into lower end processor families, adding seven new parts to its Celeron and Pentium lines, along with another Core processor for good measure.

The Exynos 5 Octa is the first to implement the ARM big.LITTLE processing technology based on the Cortex A15 CPU.

Today's high-end smartphones are going to seem like little more than slow relics before the year is over. ARM's licensing partners have come out swinging at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, including Samsung, which earlier today introduced the Exynos 5 Octa. As the name suggests, it's an 8-core processor and the world's first mobile chip to use ARM's new big.LITTLE technology.

AMD sounded energitic and optimistic during its press conference at CES.

Hours after Intel took to the stage at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas to talk about its ambitious mobile strategy, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) followed suit with a press conference of its own, only it didn't talk about entry-level smartphones for emerging markets. AMD came out reiterating its Surround Computing strategy, a topic it's brought up before. Somewhat spunky and confident, this wasn't an AMD that sounded like it's about to roll over and play dead. Let's have a look at some of the highlights.

AMD is about to deliver a low-power Piledriver part.

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is reportedly getting ready to launch its first power-efficient eight-core AMD FX-8300 processor. The eight-core part, due for release December 29, 2012, boasts a 95W thermal design, making it a good choice for higher-powered home theater PC setups and anyone else in need of a quiet (yet relatively potent) system. It should also offer some nice overclocking potential, albeit at a price.

The majority of Windows 8 tablets won't start shipping until 2013.

Wondering where all the Windows 8 tablets that were supposed to ship before the end of the year are hiding? It seems they've all been bitten by a driver bug, or at least the ones built around Intel's Atom Z2760 processor. The "Clover Trail" part is an energy efficient CPU that promises all-day battery life, but it's reportedly been challenging trying to code drivers that are stable enough to pass Microsoft's Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL) testing.

Could this be the actual lineup for Haswell desktop parts?

Tech rumor site VR-Zone claims to have an authentic list of Intel’s first wave of “Haswell” desktop processors, and while we can’t confirm it outright, the parts listed seem highly plausible. Of the 14 CPU’s detailed, 6 fall under the category “standard power” with TDP’s of 84W, and 8 are referred to as “low power”, with TDP’s ranging between 65W - 35W.

Atom: It's not just for netbooks anymore.

Intel's Atom family gained notoriety as the architecture of choice for netbooks and nettops, but the future is so much brighter than that. There's of course the mobile handset and tablet categories, and as of today, you can add servers to Atom's resume. Intel's new Atom-based S1200 product family is the world's first low-power, 64-bit server-class system-on-chip (SoC) for high-density microservers, the Santa Clara chip maker announced today.